


the way to a man's heart is straight through his chest

by silverxrain



Series: the spider and the elephant [5]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 03:55:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4044940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverxrain/pseuds/silverxrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>can I even help someone without hurting them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	the way to a man's heart is straight through his chest

Natasha hates it that after all this time, she’s still doing things the way they taught her.

Some things aren’t so bad. The Red Room taught her to set herself alight, become an inferno to consume every enemy in her path, a bloody, snarling, beautiful animal, but masked with the controlled grace of a ballerina, ferocity of a wolf, elegance of a tiger. The Red Room made her the type of warrior she is, all these elements combining to create the ultimate Black Widow spider, beautiful and deadly and anything she needed to be.

Seduction, hanging there, like an overabundance of perfume sprayed into the air. Seduction so obvious and so effortless it’s difficult not to laugh out loud. Every man or woman just _falls_ , god damn it all, they just fall on their knees for her, and if they don’t fall, she can always break their kneecaps.

She hates that what they taught her gives her all her power. She hates that she doesn’t know what she is without it, and she will never know if red might have been her favorite color, once. Natasha is learning how to be a person, but she will always be growing around the hollowed out spaces inside her.

Sometimes, she swear she can feel it. The emptiness somewhere in her abdomen. She has no idea what they did to her, even now. She’s always avoided reading up on the process, even when the files were available to her. Now they’re on the Internet, available to everyone, and anyone who wants to can find out what they did to her, anyone can know that she’s empty in her abdomen, and she feels disgusting and warped and _green_. Shame. They reached into her and they ripped it out. It’s not like they didn’t take everything else too, but ‘everything else’ is nameless, intangible matter, not like this, which has a name, a name for the procedure, a name for her loss. Natasha feels shamed. Distantly, she realizes this is what it is to have your body violated, changed, without your consent or even full knowledge. Natasha has no idea what they did to her in there, but they took something from her. It just happened, and she didn’t know how, and she couldn’t stop it. She hates that she feels helpless, in a way she hasn’t since the early days when she clung to Clint and waited, cringing, for a blow to fall from the ghosts of masters she hadn’t realized weren’t there anymore. She feels helpless like she hasn’t since the day she realized how twisted she was. It seems now, she’s seeing the full extent of what they took.

“I can’t have kids,” Banner tells her, and she wants to laugh in his face. Of course you can’t. Two fucking peas in a pod, right, Bruce? That’s what we are. A couple of monsters. Perfect match for each other in every way. She tells him so. Gently, of course. Despite the Hulk, Banner has retained the gentle spirit that probably possessed him to become a doctor in the first place. She has a sense he would not appreciate her sharp angles and hard edges, and that’s okay by her, because she’s tired of using them. She doesn’t let her guard down, she throws messages in bottles over the barricade at Bruce, and unlike most people, he catches them before they hit the ground and shatter. 


End file.
